


Building Skyscrapers in the Basement

by 17603



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Awkwardness, Canon Typical Violence, Discussions of Suicide, M/M, Music, Repression, bad language, gratuitous literary references, inaccurate science, kind of ignores the movie, levels of bastardry on par with the ultimates, liberties taken with canon mixing, tasing
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-06-12
Updated: 2012-06-11
Packaged: 2017-11-07 12:56:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,855
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/431440
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/17603/pseuds/17603
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clint Barton has no idea who he's sitting next to.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Building Skyscrapers in the Basement

**Author's Note:**

> Fair warning: this is going to be long. It might take a while because I write slowly and out of order, but it won't be left alone. If you find anything I should have tagged/warned for and didn't, let me know. Warnings/tags may be updated as I post more, but probably not much.
> 
> Title is from a Ted Leo song.

 

The memo goes out a week and a half in advance. All members of the Avengers Initiative and support personnel are required to report to the fourth floor debriefing room at oh-nine-hundred on Thursday for a Hulk management dry run. They’re going to go over safety protocols, do some extensive what-iffing, cover the scientific basics and then Clint Barton is going to shoot the big green guy with a new and improved tranq arrow. Provided it works, everyone can then escape to lunch. Tony Stark has already sent his preemptive lack-of-regrets - on Friday he told them that he was planning to have an emergency meeting come up at the last minute and wouldn’t be able to make it - but everyone else is there at eight fifty-nine when Clint arrives, bow in hand as ordered. The only seat left is up the front, between Coulson (who gives him an all-purpose disapproving look) and one of the scientists (who is possibly asleep). It’s not like he’s even late, he was exactly on time. He doesn’t see Natasha, but Rogers is on Coulson’s right, clutching a notepad and pencil. He probably got there first, and Clint would make fun of him if he wasn’t totally in awe of Captain America and slightly afraid of getting his ass kicked.  
  
“If you’re ready,” Fury says, looking pointedly at Clint as he slides into his seat and stashes his gear behind his legs, “Doctor Pym is going to start us off with some background information.”  
Someone stands up too quickly and their chair legs squeal on the linoleum. Doctor Pym (presumably) hurries to the front, noisily shuffling a stack of papers. He has sticky-out ears that stop his square jaw and neat hair from making him look _too_ serious and professional, and an unsettling light in his eyes, the restrained excitement of someone who knows a lot about something and is determined to speak about it at length to whoever will listen.  
  
Clint slides down in his seat and braces himself for Science.  
  
Forty minutes later, Pym is still talking. As far as Clint can tell, he’s not even talking about the Hulk, he’s talking about genetic mutation and cellular integrity and even Rogers looks glassy-eyed, though he’s still vigilantly taking notes. Coulson seems alert, but it’s obvious from the way his hands hang limply between his legs and his head is cocked to one side that he’s checked out. The scientist isn’t even pretending to pay attention, he’s got his knees drawn up and one arm curled protectively around his clipboard, scribbling furiously and oblivious to any attempts at eye contact.  
  
“Is there going to be a test later?” Clint whispers to Coulson, who twitches (after the second time, when he accompanies the question with an elbow in the side, right under where his gun is strapped) and gives him a faint frown.  
“Background information is necessary.”  
“This is a _panoramic_ background, I could go and make my own Hulk after all this,” Clint mutters.  
“Barton,” Coulson says in his I’m-warning-you voice, eyes still focused front.  
“Do you think he knows how to make other colours of Hulk?” he says, “I don’t look good in green, purple is much more me, I’m going to ask,” although he isn’t, he’s just going to seem like he’ll put his hand up and see what his boss does about it. Coulson calls his bluff and kicks him serenely in the ankle, but there’s a bitten off laugh from his other side, and out of the corner of his eye he can see from the curve of the scientist’s cheek that he’s smiling, face turned almost away.  
  
Pym doesn’t seem to notice any of this, and his monologue, which is now about the unexplored physiological effects of forced mutations, does not waver in the slightest. The scientist flicks his eyes to Pym, then back to Clint, and pulls a face.  
  
Clint rolls his eyes as far back as they can go and mimes sleep. Coulson’s heel digs into the arch of his foot. The scientist grins and hooks a few strands of hair from behind his glasses, and lowers the clipboard to rest on his lap. Clint sees a chance and goes for it.  
  
“Clint Barton,” he whispers, holding out a hand. The scientist looks amused, but accepts it and they shake.  
“I know who you are,” he replies. His hands are big for such a small guy, such thin wrists, and the disproportion is kind of charming in a badly-put-together way, like he was built out of leftover parts. He doesn’t offer his own name.  
“What department are you in?” Clint hasn’t seen him around before, which isn’t that odd because SHIELD is bigger on the inside, further up and further in and all that, but if he’s senior enough to sit near Coulson and blatantly ignore the debriefing without being ritually disemboweled, he’s probably someone Clint should know. “Do you do science stuff?”  
“Oh, no,” he says quietly, plucking absently at the front of his greying lab coat, “I just wear this because I like the look. I’m actually one of the kitchen staff.” He grins. “Maybe you’re familiar with my work?”  
“Are you in charge of the pancakes?” says Clint.  
“Are the pancakes any good?” says the scientist.  
“Are you two quite finished?” says Coulson.  
“Are there any questions?” says Hank.  
  
Mercifully, no one raises their hand (no one so much as breathes, classic prey response), and Pym is replaced by Captain Dawson, who speaks briefly about basic safety protocols with both enormous arms folded across his chest. He does not have slides, or notes, or much of a neck. The scientist leans back and stretches out, legs crossed at the ankle, and appears to be listening attentively. No amount of leaning and peering reveals the location of his badge, it’s not clipped to his lab coat pocket or shirt pocket like everyone else's, or even on a lanyard around his neck like Sitwell used to wear his (the dork) until it got caught in a car door and nearly throttled him. Peering at his clipboard proves futile, it’s mostly covered in cramped equations.  
“As long as no one engages in foolish or inflammatory behavior, the risks of interacting with the subject in either form are minimal,” Dawson rumbles, and Clint (who knows when he’s being watched) snaps his eyes back to the front. “Repercussions for violations of these rules will be severe.”  
 _Agent Barton_ , though unsaid, practically echoes on the end.  
  
“I don’t think he likes you,” the scientist murmurs after Dawson is safely out of earshot.  
Clint shrugs. “We have our differences.”  
“Is he the guy you fell out of the ceiling onto?”  
How does everyone know that story? Fury is obviously a bigger gossip than previously suspected, because it’s not one Clint tells at bar night and he’s willing to bet that Dawson doesn’t either.  
“It was a structural fault in the building, not an intentional attack.” It was Clint Barton, a nerf gun and four pounds of plaster dust and dead insects plunging through a broken drop-tile ceiling into the locker room showers. If they’d been empty, Clint would have landed on his face on the tiles and broken his neck, which may have actually been better than landing on a nude and soapy Captain Dawson and spending two months in the SHIELD equivalent of after-school detention (Arizona).  
The scientist grins. “There are probably tactical advantages to attacking someone while they’re in the shower though. No concealed weapons.”  
“Speak for yourself,” Clint sniffs, and doesn’t mention that the best time, technically, is when they’ve bent over the bathroom sink after brushing their teeth, because that’s creepy. Out of the corner of his eye he sees the edge of another smile, briefly, before the scientist ducks his head and hair falls forward over his face. Before he can make a crack about Natasha killing someone with a bottle of shampoo, the lights are dimmed and the tactical briefing starts. Rogers lights up like a Christmas tree, leaning forwards in his seat with his pencil practically quivering over his notepad. They’ll be discussing this at length later, clearly, so Clint settles in to listen and the conversation trails off.  
  
Clint catches Coulson glancing at him when they play some news footage of the Hulk smashing through a solid stone wall, except he realizes it’s not at him, it’s past him. The scientist is staring at his hands, folded neatly in his lap, one ragged thumbnail gouging at the bony bump of knuckle of the other. He’s close to breaking the skin.  
  
He doesn’t look entirely scared; there’s something else pulling at the corners of his mouth, something in the curve of his neck and stooped shoulders, something harder to pin down.  
  
Phil kicks him in the ankle (Phil is the only person in the universe to wear hard-soled, steel-capped, shin-length combat boots under a suit, ready for anything) and jerks his head - just the tiniest amount - in their general direction.  
  
Accidentally on purpose, Clint bumps their shoulders together. The scientist jumps, hands whipping back to his trousers pockets (out of reach under his lab coat) and sliding down the sides of his legs until he’s sitting on them. His eyes are wide.  
“I hear he’s actually quite sweet,” Clint whispers, nodding at the screaming figure on the screen. “Once you get to know him.”  
The scientist doesn’t exactly laugh, but he lets out a little huff of air that might be amused and peers at him from over the top of his glasses. It occurs to Clint that he may be sharing lab space with Dr Banner.  
“Really,” he continues, warming to the topic. “He’s a big pussycat, he’s just lonely. He only wants a girlfriend and for people to stop shooting at him all the time, like a big green King Kong.”  
“A girlfriend?” The scientist says faintly.  
Clint shrugs. “Or a boyfriend. We’re not hung up on such inconsequential details here at SHIELD. As long as he doesn’t climb up the Empire State building with them in his arms.”  
The look on his face is mostly alarmed incredulity, but there’s a twitch at the corner of his mouth, bitten-looking lips pulling into the beginnings of a smile. “Is this a new official stance? Or is taming the savage beast usually done in stages now? Music, beauty, then tranquilizers?”  
“It’s actually one of the secret objectives of the Initiative, passed down to select ears by Fury himself,” he whispers. “I shouldn’t be telling you this, Agent Coulson will have me brutally murdered with a clipboard later, but-”  
  
Coulson kicks him brutally hard in the ankle, probably because there are too many witnesses to make brutally murdering him practical. Clint’s right foot is going to be black and blue later for sure, it’s going to look like it’s been fucking tie-dyed, but now he just yelps embarrassingly loudly and everyone turns to look at him. Captain America scowls. The agents presenting the tactical debrief scowl. Fury rumbles somewhere a few rows back, angry and out of sight but probably also scowling. Coulson ignores him.  
  
He can’t look at the scientist, he’ll start laughing and won’t be able to stop.  
  
As the talk resumes, he risks a glance. The scientist grins and ducks away.  
  
It’d be really nice if this guy was going to be at more of these enthralling mandatory talks, or if he was one of the R&D staff assigned to the Initiative or something, just so they can have some kind of stilted and probably doomed casual friendship based on making jokes about classified information. It’s been awhile since he’s had a friend he didn’t have to take orders from, or a friend who didn’t cheerfully crush him into the mats every sparring session. He’d like a friend who has a life outside of SHIELD, outside of covert ops, who doesn’t case every room they step into and can go out to a bar, have a few drinks and talk about something other than work.  
  
  
Afterwards, when everyone is filing dutifully out, Clint says “so, do you think the new tranq is going to work?”  
It’s an excuse to start the conversation again, but he’d really like an answer to that, actually. The scientist nods. “It’s the first one to be both a sedative and an antibody, so it’ll lower the heart rate and cause unconsciousness, but it also attacks the problem on a cellular level, it, uh,” he pauses, blinks slowly, visibly checking himself for something. “It’s like a vaccine, part of the Hulk’s invulnerability comes from the ability to generate new cells extremely quickly, make accurate copies with almost no degeneration, like why Captain Rogers lived even in the ice, why he’ll probably live for a couple hundred more years.”  
Clint hadn’t thought of that, he vaguely remembers something about Banner working on recreating the super soldier serum. “So it jams the signal?”  
The scientist grins, nodding, eyes bright. Standing up, it’s obvious that his lab coat is too long and his trousers are too large, hanging off his hips and gathering around his ankles. He looks young, except around the eyes. “Exactly. It causes a temporary cell, uh, a pause, I guess. Together with the sedative, it means a quicker return to, ah, normal.”  
  
He’s definitely in one of the science divisions, not that Clint ever _really_ thought he worked in the kitchen. “That’s awesome. And you should have done the Hulk talk,” Clint tells him, and means it. “Because I understood all of that.”  
“I can’t,” he says softly, suddenly sad, glancing over his shoulder. He does that a lot; he’s nervous, paranoid in the open hallway. “My clearance isn’t high enough.”  
It sounds a bit like bullshit, or not the whole truth, but after six years at SHIELD, Clint knows how to play the long game on that one; don’t push, stay sharp, wait for an opportunity or a slip. “You can tell me why the Hulk is green and not purple or blue or something though, right?”  
“I’ve always liked green,” he says, which is a weird answer and not what Clint asked, but when he looks up from rolling a tiny loose thread off the rubber grip of his bow to tell him this, the scientist is gone.  
  
The only person there is Coulson, face shuttered and eyes cold, who catches his elbow as he passes.  
“Don’t want to be late, Barton,” he says briskly, and Clint almost has to trot to keep up with his pace down the halls. Everyone else has piled into elevators or stairwells and the echo of voices and footsteps bouncing off scuffed linoleum has been replaced by silence.  
“That guy I was sitting next to,” he says, completely casual and totally disinterested, though the effect is ruined when he leans on the elevator buttons by accident and they all light up. “What department does he work in?”  
Agent Coulson, his immediate superior, switches seamlessly to Phil Coulson, the guy who has been the closest thing he has to a friend (other than Natasha) since he started at SHIELD. Phil Coulson is giving him the you-must-be-fucking-kidding-me look.  
  
“You must be fucking kidding me,” he says as the doors open to an empty hallway. This is unfair; just because Phil knows almost everyone at SHIELD doesn’t mean that Clint has the time, clearance or inclination to do the same.  
“Who is he? He does work here, right?”  
Phil gives him another look, an extension of the you-must-be-fucking-kidding-me look that covers you-are-unbelievable and why-does-the-lord-test-me-so, but any answer he was possibly going to give is cut off when the doors open on another floor and a junior agent gets in. The rest of the ride is spent in irritable silence, but just before they go into the basement gym, Phil grabs him by the elbow and hisses “you might want to read the files I put in your inbox from time to time.”  
  
Clint is about to protest that he does (usually), he’s been much better about that lately, but Phil snaps back to Agent Coulson and sails through the big double doors before he can say anything and he has no choice but to try and keep up.  
  
  
The training room is full. At least, the taped off section around the door looks full, but there’s probably no more than forty or fifty people there, milling around talking amongst themselves when Clint trots in, bow in hand, and starts unpacking.  
  
“This isn’t going to be easy,” Phil says under the cover of the chattering. He’s got the prototype arrow in one of the long cardboard boxes that R &D send Clint explosive prototypes in, identical except it’s stamped with a biohazard symbol instead of the usual warnings. “And it’s not going to get easier.”  
Clint doesn’t like the look in his eyes; if something spooks Phil Coulson, it must be pretty bad, he wasn’t fazed at the Iron Man trials, he wasn’t fazed when they hauled Rogers out of the ice (oh, he swooned a little), he wasn’t even fazed in New Mexico when the Space Vikings fought a giant robot, and Clint can’t even _think_ that with a straight face. “Maybe I’ll get used to it,” he hazards, because he’s gotten used to a lot of things and the Hulk will apparently be on their side anyway, better at the right hand of the devil than in his path, but Phil just shakes his head. The noise suddenly dies off.  
  
Fury, Pym and four SHIELD heavy response troopers stomp in through the sparse and quickly parting crowd. There’s someone else walking with them, someone small squared by broad shoulders and matte black kevlar armor. Clint doesn’t crane his neck to look, even though he really wants to. He’ll get to see the mysterious Dr Banner soon enough.  
  
Fury stops. The room is silent. The SWAT guys lined up along the walls have stopped fidgeting. Steve Rogers looks impassive. Natasha catches his eye and blinks, just once.  
  
The guy in the middle is the scientist.  
  
Clint sat next to him for the past two hours, cracked inappropriate jokes, asked him about a purple Hulk, made a bunch of stupid comments about taming beasts and pancakes and he feels like such a complete idiot that it’s hard to look in the direction he’s supposed to. He actually feels physically sick. No wonder, no wonder he was so, of course he would be, of course, no wonder to a lot of things.  
  
Banner has taken off his lab coat, shoes and shirt, and he’s unclipping his ID tag from the waistband of his trousers (ah ha!), fumbling at it because he’s nervously looking around the gym from under his curtain of hair instead of watching what he’s doing. He’s thin and narrow and his hands shake when he carefully takes off his glasses and gives them to Pym, who seems to have the rest of his clothing balled up under one arm.  
  
Phil leans even closer, so close Clint can feel the heat radiating off his skin on the side of his neck. “Never shoot him in the head, hands, neck or torso,” he mutters. “You read me, Barton, never shoot him anywhere except the shoulder or leg, upper arms will do in a pinch.”  
“Yeah, got it,” he says, staring at the worn grip on his favourite recurve bow, the one he has _killed people by shooting them with_. “I can do that.”  
“That’s why this is your job,” Phil tells him, stepping back. “I know you won’t miss.”  
  
“Whenever you’re ready, Doctor,” Fury says, waving one gracious hand as though he’s offering him the floor to lecture. Banner gives him a vague kind of grimace, squinting a little, and walks thirty paces forward, alone, towards the empty space in the middle of the gym. Clint isn’t sure what he expects, an explosion maybe, but it isn’t for Banner to settle on his knees, feet tucked under himself and palms flat on the floor, and start doing weird yoga breathing. He looks really small.  
  
Minutes pass. There is dead silence, so loud it echoes off the exposed metal girders, with the weird almost-panting from the figure on the floor. Nothing happens.  
  
“Terribly sorry,” Banner says, and he actually sounds sorry, a little bit rueful too. He sounds like he’s apologising for bumping into someone in a hallway because he wasn’t paying attention to where he was going, it’s something you might say when you’re gathering up scattered papers or mopping coffee off someone’s front with the sleeve of your jacket. Fury nods at him, just once, and then waves one of the SWAT guys over.  
  
Clint knows it’s going to be bad when he glances at Coulson, but it’s not Coulson standing next to him any more, it’s just Phil and his eyes are shut, flickering open every few seconds like backwards blinking. He looks a lot like he did when Clint woke up in a warehouse in Oakland with a bullet jammed in one of his floating ribs and a bloody hand twisting in his hair. He looks a lot like he did when they found the crumpled (but not dead) body of one of their best HYDRA double agents at the bottom of a stairwell in Georgia (the country, not the state). He looks a lot like he did five weeks ago when he and Fury went upstate for three days on a mission so classified that it technically didn’t happen at all and Clint now has a pretty good idea about.  
  
Banner makes a horrible baritone noise, somewhere between a yelp and a scream, when the taser electrodes connect between his pointy shoulderblades. His body snaps backwards, arching up off the floor. The electricity cuts, and even with a full face mask, the way the SWAT trooper is looking at Fury is unmistakable; head cocked, cringing slightly, hand clutching the taser hanging loosely at his side. SHIELD doesn’t hire psychopaths, not officially. Fury nods. SWAT guy hesitates.  
  
“Once more should do it,” Banner hisses. It’s almost a snarl. He’s shaking, curling in on himself with his elbows on his knees, but not as badly as he is when the current starts up again, and suddenly he’s not just pitching forwards from whatever obscene voltage they’re firing into his nervous system, he’s growing.  
  
He’s getting really big.  
  
And turning green.  
  
The electrode falls off.  
  
Bruce Banner and the muscles barely visible in his thin limbs have been replaced by twelve feet of angry green bulk, an assault weapon in generally humanoid form; low sloping brow, thick neck, solid torso and powerful legs. Its hands are enormous, Clint’s willing to bet it could pick him up with one arm, one fist curling the whole way around his torso. It could crush any of them, as easily as they’d snap a twig,  
  
The creature doesn’t look particularly enraged (not like in the news footage), if anything it’s confused, peering around the gym, shoulders hunched and arms curling loosely up over its chest, almost a boxer’s stance. It’s assessing the threat. Everyone is completely silent.  
“Barton,” Phil mutters, “arms and legs only, whenever you’re ready.”  
He’s not sure he’s ready (it is fucking huge, and green, but mostly huge), but that’s as close as Coulson gets to telling him to hurry up, so Clint draws back and releases. The tranq dart hits the creature in the upper arm, right in the dip between the deltoid and bicep, and it snarls, turning towards him with teeth bared. There are a few horrible seconds where he’s sure it didn’t work and a big angry green fist is going to swing down and crush him, but it falters in mid step and crashes down on the polished floor to the creak and snap of splintering wood. The creature seems to exhale, except it didn’t, and it keeps getting smaller like one continuous outward breath. It looks slightly less green.  
  
The room unfreezes and people rush forwards - not too fast though - and the last thing Clint sees before the body is fully surrounded is a rapidly shrinking hand that is only the smallest bit green.  
  
“Think you’ll ever get used to that?” Coulson says, and strides off into the crowd before he can even begin to answer.  
  
  
Clint did read the Hulk file that was provided for him. He read the whole thing, same with the files for the other unknowns, Stark and Rogers and Thor (who he is totally psyched to meet properly), because he’s a good agent even if he’s not a Good Agent, and sitting on his bed waiting for the six o’clock briefing to roll around, he reads it again, but this time he’s not looking for the Hulk. He’s looking for Bruce Banner.  
  
There’s not much real information, and what there is hovers invisible between lines of words like _trauma_ and _detainment_ and _necessary force_. The single profile sheet is mostly about his education and article publications, which are extensive and seem impressive, not like Clint’d really be able to tell. The space under family says _deceased_ in cold black typewriter letters. He’s five foot seven. Medications don’t work the way they should on him. There’s nothing about who he is or what he thinks about the trauma and detainment, or his opinion of whether the force was too necessary or just necessary enough. Five foot seven and one hundred and twenty one pounds with hazel eyes and no identifying marks; that’s the most personal information anyone can learn about Bruce Banner from his SHIELD file.  
  
The photo paper-clipped to the top might as well be of a different man; a too-thin man with roughly shorn hair and deep blue hollows under his unfocused eyes, a lolling head and mouth partly open, held in the frame of the picture by a hand under each arm. It’s not the long-haired man with a sharp smile and baggy professor clothing, except it is, taken eight months prior at a military base in upstate New York. The incident reports, which he skims through, discuss Dr Robert Bruce Banner as a sort of attachment to the Hulk, a secondary part of the primary issue.  
  
The Hulk is not the one who spent five nights in the Fort Drum infirmary with a shattered wrist and internal bleeding after they hauled him out of the woods in Canada. That was Bruce Banner. It was Bruce Banner in a cell, heavily sedated, alone for months.  
  
Bruce Banner, no matter what the file seems to think, is not the Hulk.  
  
He’s a lot of things probably, a lot of things Clint doesn’t understand or know much about and won’t ever see and maybe don’t matter, but he’s also the first person in six years who hasn’t told him to shut up. Coulson doesn’t count; it’s his job to (and when he’s Phil, when they’re friends, he still sometimes shakes his head and says something like _goddamn, Barton, you do talk a lot of shit_ and they laugh but it’s still telling him to please stop). Clint’s military, he’s trained and professional and capable, but he’s also weighed down with the memories of late nights around fires in the fields of middle America, staring back and forth between the embers and the sky, hypnotic tones of born and raised performers echoing in his head until he can see the long shadows of Odysseus and Anansi and Baba Yaga moving in the tall grass, beyond reach of his voice, well outside their tiny bright island of reality.  
  
He never left the firelight on those nights, the darkness didn’t belong to him then.  
  
The stories from everyone’s old country (and the stories from the newer countries and the movies he and Barney snuck into and the books he read whenever he found them) aren’t easy memories any more, now they hold their mirrors up to his life and he can’t help but see them everywhere, new endings. Abdiel in crisp white shirtsleeves, faithful only he, ignores a direct order and kills four people in Georgia (the country, not the state) to save the man they’re meant to bring home and is demoted for his devotion. Hector of Troy spends seventy years asleep in ice while his father pleads for his body and everyone he loves dies, but at least the empire doesn’t fall. Dr Jekyll, half naked, trembles under the watchful eyes of strangers and calls up Mr Hyde, and he’ll do it again and again, for their convenience.  
  
Clint closes the file and drops it to the floor, settles back with his hands folded behind his head, and stares at the fluorescent ceiling lights until his vision flickers in time with the tubes. In his head, he deliberately replays the snap of a taser, the twist of sinew and bone, the green-skinned fists gathered close to strike, but keeps coming back to five foot seven, hazel eyes, one hundred and twenty one pounds, _I’ve always liked green_.

 


End file.
